Considering actors' embodied participation in improvisational activities

This paper presents interdisciplinary research connecting sociolinguistics and applied performance praxis to analyse how actors draw from their repertoires in improvisational activities to participate and influence peer... [ view full abstract ]

This paper presents interdisciplinary research connecting sociolinguistics and applied performance praxis to analyse how actors draw from their repertoires in improvisational activities to participate and influence peer participation. Applied performance praxis refers to a way of working in the applied drama, theatre and performance fields using drama-based methodologies to engage psycho-social objectives in educational, community or therapeutic contexts. Improvisational activities can be understood as facilitated strategies that ask the actor to generate embodied responses to stimuli. Such activities are characterised by spontaneous responses from actors, simultaneous turn taking and accumulative and collaborative interactional work. Since improvisational activities always involve a facilitator and connected institutions (i.e. venue, funder, etc.), this study is entwined with set interactional orders maintained by language ideologies. Defined as socially shared beliefs about language, language ideologies allow me to link micro analytic approaches with the actors’ broader sociopolitical context, adopting an interactional sociolinguistic and discourse historical analytic approach. In this context, the aim of the paper is to present recent findings from PhD research that conceptualises how improvisational activities mobilise complex formations of embodied linguistic responses to influence participation.

I draw from a corpus of video recordings of rehearsals in a contemporary South African multilingual university context, focusing on a selection of episodes from one rehearsal dedicated to an improvisational activity. When these episodes are analysed sequentially they reveal a significant variety of embodied interactional work by actors, who each learn the rules of the improvisational activity and choose how to participate. As this improvisational activity is facilitated, I will consider the framing and rules within the facilitation to lay out exactly how interactional work is shaped in this rehearsal. More specifically, I focus on how the participation of peer actors influence and eventually change the participation of at least one of the actors. I highlight how actors’ embodied participation in this activity informs readings of later linguistic participation. My preliminary findings foreground improvisational activities as rich multimodal sites for not just analysing, but influencing, participation. These findings aim to contribute to participant-led paradigms for performance making that draw from actors’ linguistic repertoires.